Bus Company Fails at Racial Divide and Conquer

[Omaha Steve]

http://labornotes.org/blogs/2014/09/bus-company-fails-racial-divide-and-conquer

September 25, 2014 / Jenny Brown

Update: Members approved the contract in a Thursday vote.

Bus workers in Amalgamated Transit Union Local 788 are celebrating a tentative agreement after they called management on outrageous racism.

The workers, who serve St. Louis, including Ferguson, have been trying for over three years to get a new contract with Metro, the bi-state agency that runs the buses. The union said the new contract preserves workers’ defined benefit pension plan, increases wages, and improves health care coverage.




Members are voting today.

Part of the reason the contract took so long, said ATU President Larry Hanley before the agreement, was that “the company is populated by racial arsonists.

“They have economic goals for the agency, and the linchpin of economic goals these days is to strip the workers of pensions and wages,” Hanley explained in early September. “The method that the agency has chosen to use is to separate workers by race and category.”

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Most of the drivers are Black, and most of the mechanics are white. So “officials of the agency have been privately negotiating with the mechanics to get them to leave the ATU, telling them they can get them more,” said Hanley. “In other words, ‘If you aren’t part of that Black bus drivers union, we’re going to take care of you.’”

- See more at: http://labornotes.org/blogs/2014/09/bus-company-fails-racial-divide-and-conquer#sthash.lP6tZuhL.dpuf

FULL story at link.

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